​Let's start this analysis of religion from the only place we should begin, our own minds. That's because we are not born with the institutional ideas present in human-made religions. That much we know for sure. Religious ideas are schooled into us by fellow humans. Religion didn't begin with cathedrals, clergy, doctrines, and holy books. It began with a human in a natural state.

So let's revert to our own natural state clean of any indoctrination and do a gedanken, a thought experiment. We'll consider actual history, and where that fails think through how religions must have begun and developed as if we were there in the beginning ourselves.

Primitive Personal Religion

As a primitive person alone in the wild, you would have been dumbfounded by what you woke up to each day. You would have no idea why fruit appeared on trees, what caused babies, why autumn leaves fell, where you came from, and why there was death. The Earth would have seemed endless, the sun miraculous as it rose out of the Earth each morning and sank into it each evening. The heavens would be breathtaking and natural disasters terrifying. You would certainly conclude that there were powerful forces behind it all, perhaps the obvious most powerful and essential, the sun.

Unable to understand the physics and unpredictability of earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and forest fires the primitive would think something big and powerful with will was responsible. Out of this reasoning were born personified gods, some good, some evil.

Human-like gods would be conceived to give a sense of understanding, control, and security in a mysterious and dangerous world.

Tribal Religion

As populations grew and people assembled into families, tribes, and nations, rules and leadership developed. Since there was no god booming directives from the heavens, the opportunity arose for someone to speak for god(s).

There was also the problem of conscience. Not wanting to do the hard work of weighing ethical choices ("don't make me decide, just tell me what to do"), and risking god ire, humans sought leaders who claimed the ability to know the will of the parent-like gods.

Since visual images exert far more influence than spoken words, religious icons were created. They took on the nature of the people who created them.

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Not surprisingly, the gods always have the same language, hands, eyes, noses, emotions, enemies, worldview, writing style, and erroneous science as the people in the region where the god was created.

Having power over others is a natural thing for all living creatures, particularly for humans. However, a mere human would always be suspect. On the other hand, being able to speak for a god would put a person in the most powerful position on Earth. Little wonder rulers throughout time have claimed to speak for gods, or that they were gods themselves.

Religious power could be gained and spread by military might—"I won the battle because god is on my side." Special abilities, such as healing, making the moon disappear and reappear (ability to predict an eclipse) were helpful proofs of being god's earthly messenger. As the sun declined in the fall, and winter set in, people feared it would sink completely into the Earth and never return. Making the sun rise each day, and particularly at the winter solstice, by tearing the heart out of a person in sacrifice to the sun-god each morning, was convincing evidence as well.

Religious dynasties were created giving power automatically to progeny or those initiated into the privileged religious institution. Leaders put strict regulations in place, with special emphasis on veneration and obedience to the leader, which always had the end result of securing power and wealth.

Those who didn't recognize the authority of the god-leader were labeled as enemies (later as heretics and infidels). This us-against-them doctrine brought the faithful closely together with the goal of vanquishing the nonbelievers.

Religious myths were passed orally with song and story. Later, when the tribal myths could be etched in stone or on parchments, they were better inoculated against doubt, as would befit any divine word from the gods. Also, being able to see words made the myths even more powerful through the unconscious bias of sight over sound (termed scriptism or graphocentrism). Such writings themselves became elevated and venerated as religious icons.

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Holy writings and astrological meaning given to the stars had the added benefit of removing suspicion from the human leader. A mere human was not the author, just god's appointed agent for interpreting and passing the information on and executing it. However, and not accidentally, the human, as god's mouthpiece, became just like a god.

State Religion

With the advent of agriculture, society was able to transition from wandering hunter-gatherer tribes into more stationary concentrated populations. Industry and technology enabled the production of more food than could be immediately consumed. Stored food permitted the division of labor and the support of standing armies, legislators, enforcers, and ruling clergy. Society became what its belly allowed.

This is the time when people most dramatically separated into the rulers and the ruled. Rulers held the reins of all religious, political, mercantile, and military power. The ruled became generic followers, some by force, some willingly.

Today we worry about gasoline, electricity, cell phones, medical insurance, and the price of groceries. In past times, survival had to do with brute nature and the favor of the state and its religion. Torture, human sacrifice, hangings, burnings, dungeons, flaying, and drawing and quartering to punish and ferret out disobedience (sin) were just the necessary duties of the religious leaders who, ostensibly, were protecting the population from a volcano or pestilence. If the predictions or protections of the clergy didn't work, that could only mean there were insufficient torturing and sacrificial blood-letting.

Religions Have to Be Intolerant

Religious leaders policed beliefs in order to maintain identity, cohesiveness, and power. Those who ruled in religions were never interested in the independent thinking of the ruled. Honest and creative thinking was, and is, labeled arrogance or heresy, while blind following and intellectual laziness (faith) rise to the rank of virtue.

Although all organizations must begin with a revolutionary individual who does the work of overturning the previous system (and being hated and persecuted for it), no established system encourages revolution against itself.

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​Religions tell inspiring tales of their heroic founders' sedition and wonders but then must insist that the present organization is the ideal endpoint. No further change is needed other than a little incidental tweaking here and there as "new light" is revealed from the organization's "anointed" leaders.

No rabble-rousing apostates like Jesus, Mohammed, Luther, etc. allowed. Religions become rigid monuments constructed over the graves of their rebellious founders once those pesky rebels are safely dead.

Religious Retreat and Regrouping

Beginning around the sixteenth century, religious leaders had to increasingly contend with pesky intrusions by science, technology (like Gutenberg's printing press permitting people to learn on their own), and secular philosophy. It became increasingly difficult for religious leaders to screen the knowledge accessible to the masses.

Pressure was on religion to defend, for instance, Bible-based geology that explained the broken and twisted crust of the Earth by invoking the fury of a wrathful god against a "fallen world." (St. Jerome) John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, argued that "sin is the moral cause of Earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be."

No longer could fossils be explained as "models made by the Creator" before he had fully made up his mind about how to go about the creation. Beringer (1725), a Wurzburg physician and university professor, defended his religion by stating that fossils are simply "stones of a peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of Nature for his own pleasure." Others, as previously noted, concluded that fossils were put on earth by god as trials of human faith since they could not represent dead creatures because death could not have entered the world before Adam's sin.

Churches made presentations of bones proving the antediluvian giants spoken of in the Bible. (Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33) Displays were even erected proving that the height of Adam was 123 feet 9 inches, Eve 118 feet 9 inches. The bones were later found to be from a mastodon. (This doesn't mean that there may not have been human giants in the past, although not likely of the 123-foot variety. Internet search: archeological and paleontological evidence of human giants.)

Veering from religious doctrine, as pontificated by those with a divine right to the Bible, was punishable by death or worse. Even possessing a Bible was punishable by death.

Fear was life's driving force. So trying to be enlightened in those days was about as likely as trying to be enlightened while walking the gangplank or facing a herd of charging buffalo. The thirst for truth tends to be quenched by answers which have the weight of indisputable authority and the power of the sword and rack.

Nevertheless, the scientific revolution eventually tightened the logical and factual noose and sent religion into retreat.

Since religion was fundamentally about the awesome forces of nature controlled by gods, explaining those forces logically and by scientific proof emasculated or retired one god after another. Over the course of about a century, three hundred years ago, religion's grip on nature dramatically weakened.

Once it was discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe (although there are religionists who still believe geocentrism—see theprinciplemovie.com), it logically followed that man may not be the central and most important thing in the universe. This realization and the rest of the long list of embarrassing religious blunders exposed by advancing knowledge helped cause the rise of atheism, secularism, materialism, and evolution.

Not wanting further embarrassment and loss of parishioners, the Catholic Church backed away from a strict literalist Bible view. Luther and others were more tenacious. The protestant reformation argued that by just interpreting the Bible correctly and removing ecclesiastical excess and error, all problems between the Bible and science could be resolved.

Today religion clutches its primary stronghold, faith. Reason and facts are useful in all areas of life, just not in religion. (The faithful use facts and reason when they blend with belief but reject them when they don't.)

One after another religious doctrine exposed to the creeping light of science has become unseated and relabeled as a poetic metaphor intended only for moral edification. These are the same sort of desperate rescue tactics used by evolutionists when cornered by reason and evidence.

Of late, however, there has been a resurgence of religious fundamentalism fueled in part by the discovery that fact and science defeat evolution and support creation. Many, wanting the security that religion gives, take this victory as proof that a book describing the creation and claiming to be written by god is proof that the Creator of the universe wrote it and therefore true through and through.

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Introduction1. Rules for Finding Truth2. Truth Is Real and Accessible3. Origin Choices4. The Laws of Thermodynamics5. The Law of Information6. The Law of Impossibility7. The Law of Biogenesis8. The Laws of Chemistry9. The Law of Time10. Fossil Problems11. Have Humans Evolved?12. Are We Selected Mutants?13. Favorite Evolutionist Proofs14. Why Evolution Is Believed15. Free Will Proves Creation16. Design17. Biological Machines18. Nuts, Bolts, Gears, and Rotors Prove Intelligent Design19. Humans Defy Evolution20. The Anthropic Universe21. Evolution’s Impact22. Putting Religion on the Table23. How Religion Begins and Develops24. Religions Cross Pollinate25. Gods Writing Books26. Questionable Foundations of Christianity27. How Best to Measure Holy Books28. The Ultimate Holy Book Test29. Religion Unleashed30. End(s) of the World31. Defending Holy Books32. Faith33. The Source of Goodness34. Matter is an Illusion35. Weird Things Disprove Materialism36. Even Weirder Things37. Creature Testimony38. Personal Weirdness39. Proving Weird Things40. Skeptics and Debunkers41. Free Will Proves We Are Other42. Mind Outside Matter43. Death is a Return44. Life After Death45. Why There is Suffering46. The Creator47. Thinking’s Destination$1 Million Reward

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